Compliance with policies and procedures is often important to ensure health and safety for personnel as well as those many products and services related to the policies and procedures. For example, a company may have lab procedures to be followed when conducting experiments using biohazardous materials. Failure to follow the procedure may result in contamination, health risks to the personnel conducting the experiment and people who may come in contact with the user, compromise results, and other problematic scenarios.
In a specific example, in food handling processes in commercial kitchens, as well as in the medical industry, there is an inherent risk of spreading illness if employees do not follow proper procedures for hand sanitation, e.g., during food preparation, between patient visits, etc. There are mandatory requirements that should be followed for proper handwashing, often specific to the industry or context. However, to a large extent the state of the art relies solely upon employee training and hand written policies.
State of the art approaches for monitoring include identifying personnel who are assigned to perform a task together with operation of various tools used in the task performance. An employee badge can be used to determine whether assigned personnel are located in the vicinity of the required tools and serve as an indirect indicator that the assigned personnel used the tools to complete the task such as when a badge is detected near a handwashing station. However, this simply confirms presence and does not address actual compliance with a handwashing procedure. Furthermore, wearable identification devices such as badges can themselves be sources of contamination or other process compromise.